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Chapter Text

“Well, I think that’s everything,” Egon Tiedemann said, watching Mikkel cling to Ulrich’s legs as though he was never going to let him go. “You’re free to take Mikkel home.”

As Ulrich signed the paperwork Egon had put in front of him, his attention was drawn to a noise coming from behind them. He realised as he turned around that he should maybe have been prepared for this possibility, remembering that it had been about this time in 1986 that he had been arrested, yet it was still a shock to Ulrich seeing his younger self being led through Winden Police Station. Unconsciously he found himself averting his eyes as Jana arrived, although he didn’t know why; the chances of Jana recognising him as Ulrich from her future were non-existent, yet he still avoided her gaze.

“You see that kid there?” Egon asked. “Funny story. His name’s Ulrich Nielsen too. When Mikkel came in and said Ulrich Nielsen was the name of his father, and that his father worked at the police station, I thought that Ulrich was pulling some kind of prank and had sent him in here to mess with us.”

Ulrich laughed, a little too loud and too long, but Tiedemann didn’t seem to notice. “Trust me, that’s definitely a total coincidence. We’re not related to my knowledge. We were just visiting the area, thinking about possibly sticking around, and Mikkel here decided to wander off.” Would Ulrich have thought doing something like that was funny at the time? That had been at the time when Mads had not long since disappeared and Ulrich was frustrated at how useless the police were being; while adult Ulrich liked to think he wouldn’t have wanted to waste their time on some stupid prank then, when they could be out there trying to find Mads, he had to admit that maybe a few weeks earlier, before Mads disappeared, he couldn’t say for sure that he wouldn’t have tried something like that then. (Except he would have probably come up with something a bit better than that.)

Now that Mads’s body had appeared in 2019, Ulrich found himself wondering whether he’d been a bit harsh in his judgement of Egon in 1986; while Egon had made mistakes in his so-called investigation, Ulrich couldn’t exactly fault him for not having considered the involvement of time travel in Mads’s disappearance. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d seen the body himself and recognised the scar from that last Christmas Day, Ulrich wouldn’t have considered that possibility himself (maybe not even then, had Jana not mentioned the scar the day before). Then he caught another glimpse of his younger self, thought back to his own arrest and the way Egon had refused to hear him out at the time, continued to hold him longer than necessary even after Katharina had insisted no rape had occurred, and clenched his fists again to stop himself from punching the guy. No, Ulrich still had to stand by his assessment of the man as an incompetent fool.

He hadn’t raised the subject of Helge Doppler whilst collecting Mikkel, (he wasn’t sure how he could work that into conversation, considering he was supposed to be a visitor to Winden and not know anyone there) but had instead sent the police an anonymous note telling them to look harder at him; Ulrich knew it was too late for Mads now, but maybe in doing that he’d be able to save Erik Obendorf and Yasin Friese. (Either that, or Egon would just throw it out without taking any action, quite likely bearing in mind his track record, but at least Ulrich would be able to feel that he had tried.)

Mikkel clung to Ulrich’s hand as they made their way through Winden back towards the caves, as though he was afraid that if he let go of him, he’d end up stuck in 1986 for the long haul. Ulrich squeezed his hand, promising he would never let him go, that he’d get him back home to Katharina, to Magnus and Martha.

“Why would Jonas have brought me here? I don’t understand,” Mikkel began.

"Jonas? Jonas Kahnwald took you into the caves?” Ulrich asked. Mikkel recounted his tale of how he’d been separated from his siblings, of how he’d followed Jonas thinking he could trust him to get him back home, only to find himself in 1986. It hardly seemed real to Ulrich; Jonas had been friends with Magnus and Martha for years, spent lots of time in their home, Mikkel wasn’t the only one who felt he could trust him. It had only been a few months since Ulrich and Mikkel had been teasing Jonas about Martha’s crush on him; if Ulrich saw Jonas now, he thought he might have punched him in the face, and at the very least told him to stay the hell away from Martha. It seemed so strange that a part of Ulrich felt sure that there must be some kind of mistake, that Jonas and Mikkel had just got lost somehow; how could Jonas possibly have known that taking that path through the caves would have brought them into 1986, and why would he even want that? At the very least, he intended to hit Jonas with some questions as soon as they got back to 2019; when he was done with him, Ulrich would then be having a little talk with Hannah in regard to her statement to Egon back in 1986. Regina, someone who hadn’t really been friends with Ulrich and Katharina at school, had been the obvious suspect in the moment; now Ulrich wondered how he could have missed that it had been Hannah all along. Still, at least he was done with Hannah now; once he returned to 2019, Ulrich would concentrate on rebuilding his relationship with Katharina, spending time together as a family with Magnus, Martha and Mikkel.

There were the caves; Ulrich made for the direction from which he had originally arrived, towards the safety of 2019. Another passageway ran through the caves; he wasn’t sure where, or when, that would have taken him, but he had no intention of finding out. Once they were back home, Ulrich was banning the caves for the whole family.

The missing posters for Mikkel, Erik and Yasin were gone as they ran through Winden, Ulrich was determined to tell himself that this was because his anonymous note had caused Tiedemann’s team to take a hard look at Helge Doppler, meaning Erik and Yasin were never taken, rather than them having taken the wrong path and having ended up in who the hell knew what year. But the cars driving past them appeared to be recent registrations, that poster in the window they ran past was advertising a concert in 2019 that Magnus had been talking about taking Franziska to.

Ulrich had made it. He’d brought Mikkel home.

“Katharina?” he called as he opened the door. “Magnus? Martha?”

Footsteps approached, however the person who walked into the room was not Katharina.

“What is going on with you?” Hannah Kruger Kahnwald asked.

“I should be asking you that same question about your son,” Ulrich snapped. “Where is Jonas? I need to speak to him about why he led my son into the caves.” He wanted to ask Hannah about what the hell she was doing in his and Katharina’s house, considering that he had broken their relationship off before setting off to rescue Mikkel, but then realised that that was a conversation it was best not to have in Mikkel’s presence.

Hannah stared at him. “Who is Jonas? I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know anyone of that name. And why did you call out for Katharina when you first walked in? You know she hasn’t lived here since you separated three years ago, why would Katharina have been here?”

As Ulrich looked around the house, he realised that the photograph of himself with Katharina taken on their last anniversary was gone, replaced by one of himself with Hannah.

Hannah held out her phone to him. “And you need to call Chief Woller. He’s been trying to get in touch with you since yesterday, he started ringing me because you haven’t been answering your phone.”

“Chief Woller?” Ulrich asked. “What do you mean? Charlotte Doppler is chief.”

“Doppler?” Hannah repeated. “The only Doppler in Winden is Helge Doppler, and you know that he has been locked up ever since Egon Tiedemann came to question him about Mads. You were there when he confessed everything and was taken away. I have no idea who Charlotte Doppler is.”

Ulrich had thought that by retrieving Mikkel from 1986, he was bringing his family back together. But now they were torn apart even further, and he didn’t understand how, or how he could put things right.

Chapter Text

Hannah had been telling the truth about one thing, at least, Ulrich thought as he read through the old article from 1986 on his work computer; Helge Doppler really had been locked up on a psych ward back then, and as he looked at the photograph of Helge being taken away in handcuffs, Ulrich saw himself and Katharina in the background watching. A part of him wished he had some memory of having actually seen this happen. (Hannah was also in the picture, slightly to the right of Katharina; Ulrich looked now at the look on her face in the photograph and wondered why he had never seen the truth about her and her feelings for him sooner).

Further on in the same newspaper, a few lines on page six, was a story about how the unaccompanied child who had presented at Winden Police Station with injuries had been reunited with his father; no names were mentioned, just a story forgotten, pushed into the background by Helge’s arrest.

He had to admit, he’d underestimated old Egon; Ulrich had suspected that he’d probably throw out the anonymous note without acting on it because he couldn’t be bothered to get off his lazy drunk ass and do his job. For it to have got as far as actually locking Helge up, the evidence had obviously been there to be found; why had no one ever found this in the original 1986?

He also thought he knew now why the name Charlotte Doppler had meant nothing to Hannah; if Helge had been locked up in 1986, Peter would never have come to live with him on his mother’s death in 1987, so Charlotte would never have met him. Maybe she was still Charlotte Tannhaus, or maybe Charlotte something else altogether. That still didn’t explain why Torben Woller was now chief; had Charlotte never joined the force in this timeline, or was she no longer living in Winden?

The man himself walked into the room; Ulrich hastily minimised the article on Helge’s arrest. “So you’ve decided to show your face. I was trying to call you all of yesterday, even had to try Hannah in the end. We’ve had Erik Obendorf in lockup overnight because he was caught selling drugs to fourteen year olds in the high school, and people wanting answers about that dead boy that was found in the forest.”

Ulrich had known, of course, that there had been nothing he could have done to save Mads, having arrived in 1986 too late to prevent his disappearance, yet it still felt like a punch to the stomach to hear Woller discussing his late brother so casually as “that dead boy”. The news story he had been reading about Helge’s arrest had stated that Helge’s explanation of Mads having been sent to the future had been dismissed as the ramblings of a madman and a search had continued for his body in 1986; there was no reason for Torben to have connected the two, even if he’d known what Helge had claimed at the time. At the same time, there was also the sense of relief as Torben mentioned Erik Obendorf; if he was in the cells now, then Ulrich had at least managed to save him, and also Yasin Friese.

“I’ll handle Obendorf,” Ulrich hastily said; he wasn’t sure at this point how he should handle Mads, knowing he wouldn’t be believed if he shared everything he knew. “Er, by the way, is Charlotte here today?”

Torben stared at him. “Who?”

“Charlotte Tannhaus.”

“I don’t know who that is. The only person called Tannhaus who lived here was old H. G. Tannhaus, and he died about twenty years ago. The only family he had were all killed in that accident back in ’71.”

“Forget it, my mistake,” Ulrich said hastily, realising he’d better drop that line of questioning before he ended up sharing Helge’s cell; Torben was already looking at him oddly. “I’ll go and deal with Erik Obendorf.”

This made no sense. How had rescuing Mikkel and getting Helge arrested caused no one in town to remember Charlotte?

The encounter with Jurgen Obendorf, who wasn’t happy that Erik had been locked up overnight, wasn’t easy, yet at the same time Ulrich couldn’t help but flash back to his previous encounters with the man as Jurgen demanded to know what leads he had on Erik’s whereabouts, and how he couldn’t help but think back to his own such encounters with Egon Tiedemann in 1986. Once Jurgen had taken Erik home, promising that this wouldn’t happen again, Ulrich left the station, hoping to try and make some sense of what was going on with his family.

“You’d better explain what the hell is going on,” Magnus said as Ulrich approached. Resisting the urge to tell his son that he would do that if he understood what was going on himself, Ulrich asked what he meant.

“Mikkel called Martha in tears,” Magnus explained. “He said he couldn’t understand why Hannah was in the house, called her Jonas’s mother, whoever that is. It was like he didn’t even know that she’d moved in with you three years ago. Do you not remember how hard it was for him back when you first got together? He blamed himself for ages because he’d been playing that game on your phone when that message from her came through and he hadn’t been able to hide it from Mom in time. He thought that if he could have just deleted it before she saw it, maybe she wouldn’t have found out and left you. It was weeks before he could sleep on his own without getting into bed with one of us, crying. Do you remember the time when Mikkel egged Hannah’s car and all the two of you could do was yell at him for it? He was just starting to get back to being himself again, and now you’ve obviously upset him in some way. What happened?”

In the timeline Ulrich had experienced, the affair with Hannah had only been going on a few months; he hadn’t got as far as considering leaving Katharina for Hannah, and even without the context that he knew now, he didn’t think that it would ever have come to that. The possible effect it would have had on Mikkel (and Magnus and Martha) had been a big part of the reason why, but if he was honest with himself, he didn’t see a future in his relationship with Hannah and never really had. If something like Magnus had described had forced it out in the open, would Ulrich have fought for his marriage to Katharina, or would he have done what this version of himself seemed to have done and thrown in his lot with Hannah?

“Where is Mikkel?” he asked.

“Like I’m going to let you anywhere near him right now,” Magnus snorted. “Martha and Bartosz have just spent the last hour trying to calm him down. He keeps talking to them about someone called Jonas, says this person took him into the caves. Who the hell is Jonas?”

Ulrich hadn’t even thought about it, but suddenly remembered Hannah’s comment from before, where she hadn’t seemed to know who he was talking about either. “Jonas Kahnwald? Hannah’s son, he’s best friends with you and Martha and Bartosz and Franziska?”

“I don’t have a friend called Jonas! Or Franziska, come to that. And Hannah doesn’t have a son. Ines is the only Kahnwald here. Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I think I’m going to have to call Chief Woller. I think you need help.”

Magnus turned and stormed back into the house. Ulrich made as if to follow him, but was stopped by someone calling his name.

“Wait. Don’t go yet. I can give you answers.”

Ulrich knew that face. But no one in Winden had seen it in thirty two years.

“You!”

To be continued…

Chapter Text

“I really don’t know what else I can say,” Martha shook her head in frustration. None of what Mikkel was saying made any sense to her. He’d lived through those last three years after the day when Katharina had asked what Mikkel was playing on Ulrich’s phone just as the message from Hannah had flashed up asking when Ulrich was planning on telling Katharina about their affair, through them all moving out of the family home while *she* moved in, and now here he was seeming to think that those last three years had never happened, and talking about people Martha had never heard of as though they were her best friends? And having travelled back to 1986 through the caves? She wished her mother were here to help get to the bottom of this, but Katharina had been stuck in some meeting at the school and Magnus had taken off to try and speak to Chief Woller after having had some equally confusing conversation with their father, so Martha and Bartosz were having to handle this themselves.

“We could try calling Killian Obendorf,” Bartosz suggested. “He could at least confirm that Erik’s not missing.”

“You know what? That’s actually a good idea,” Martha said as she scrolled through her phone contacts. “Hi, Killian? It’s Martha and Bartosz, we have you on speaker. This might sound strange, but we need you to clear something up for my brother Mikkel.”

“Uh, okay…” Killian sounded confused, and Martha couldn’t blame him; she doubted he’d ever spoken two words to Mikkel before now.

“Where’s Erik right now, is he home?” Bartosz asked. “Mikkel seems to think he may have gone missing.”

“Erik is home having an argument with our father,” Killian explained. “I’m surprised you can’t hear it. He got arrested yesterday and spent last night in the cells. They’re talking about him possibly getting kicked out of school because he got caught selling drugs on school grounds, but don’t tell anyone I told you that. It’s not official yet.”

“See, Mikkel?” Martha asked. “Erik’s brother says he’s fine.”

“But he did go missing!” Mikkel exclaimed. “It was the 22nd of October. He’s been missing ever since then. Bartosz, you wanted to go to the caves to get his stash out of that old armchair that someone dumped at the front of them ages ago, and Franziska beat you to it.”

“Okay, that actually is a bit weird,” Killian said. “Erik did have another argument with Dad and take off that day, but he came back after a few hours. And I don’t know who Franziska is, but that crappy old armchair…Erik was keeping a stash there, or at least he was until he got arrested and Dad took it away before Woller found out about that one as well. But how would Mikkel have known that?”

Was this another thing that Ulrich had changed? He still remembered the story of how Regina had come home to find Claudia Tiedemann missing, then had gone to her grandfather’s to find Egon dead on the floor. To the best of his knowledge, Claudia had never been seen in Winden since, and was widely presumed dead; how, then, was she stood in front of him today?

“Claudia?”

“Yes. I don’t have a lot of time to explain, but things are different from the timeline that you knew because you should never have gone down that path. Mikkel was never supposed to return to 2019, but to grow up in 1986. You know him as Michael Kahnwald.”

“That is ridiculous,” Ulrich snorted, then thought back to those days in the original 1986, Michael appearing seemingly out of nowhere, Egon thinking Ulrich had sent him to the police station for a prank, him turning up at the Nielsens’ house claiming to live there, telling Katharina his mother was the principal at Winden High.

And that reminded him of something else; someone had brought up the possibility of the Berlin Wall coming down and Germany being reunified in a school assembly once, not that long before Ulrich and Katharina had left the school, and Mr Huber had shut them down, saying it wasn’t going to happen in his lifetime. Michael Kahnwald had stood up and said he bet him ten Deutsche Marks he was wrong. Michael had been kicked out of the assembly for that; everyone else had laughed and then promptly forgotten all about it. Ulrich had never thought about it again until the day he and Katharina were watching the news coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Katharina had remembered it, joking with Ulrich about whether Huber would pay up.

Huber was a pompous old fart, and Ulrich and Katharina had enjoyed someone making him look like a fool at the time, but hadn’t thought there was any more to that back then. And Claudia’s story sounded crazy enough that Ulrich still wanted to dismiss it out of hand now, even knowing as he did that time travel was possible.

Claudia was still talking. “The reason why no one apart from you and your son remembers Jonas Kahnwald is because you removed Mikkel from 1986. He never married Hannah, she was free to pursue you earlier, and Jonas was never born in this timeline. What I don’t understand is how you are all still here.”

“What are you even talking about?” Ulrich demanded.

“This timeline was never supposed to exist. The path was always supposed to stay the same. But now you have changed everything, and I no longer know what will happen to the universe if this timeline is allowed to continue. Maybe that’s why you’re still here in this world even though by rights you no longer should be, to give you a chance to fix things and set the timeline right again.”

“Fix things? Are you crazy?” Ulrich snorted. “Mikkel’s home, where he belongs. The only thing I need to fix right now is my family.”

Claudia raised her eyebrows. “Forgive me, but is he home? Is this the world that your son knows? The world where he lived with you and Katharina? He shouldn’t be here.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me about people who are and aren’t supposed to be here,” Ulrich rounded on her; Claudia stumbled backwards Logically, he knew that the blame for Mads’s disappearance lay at Helge Doppler’s door, but he’d still carried around the anger at his father and Claudia for a long time, knowing that his father was with Claudia the night Mads disappeared and maybe if he’d been home, it wouldn’t have happened, that Tronte had seemed to him at the time to have put more effort into finding Claudia after her own disappearance than he ever had into finding Mads. “Because maybe Mads would still be here had it not been for my father’s affair with you!”

“It’s just a coincidence,” Bartosz began. “Erik’s always taking off. Maybe Mikkel already found his stash or something.”

Martha ignored him. “Mikkel? What do you remember about 1986?”

“There was a newspaper,” Mikkel began. “Some story about it being half a year on from Chernobyl.”

“Everyone knows the date of that,” Bartosz interrupted. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“And there were missing posters up for Mads,” Mikkel continued. “Remember Papa’s brother? The one he spent all Christmas Day showing us pictures of three years ago when he got drunk after I opened Magnus’s present by mistake and Magnus got angry about it? Actually, it was mostly me he was showing. You and Magnus went to Bartosz’s after about two pages of it. It was 30 years after Mads had gone missing, and we’d reminded Papa of the way he and Mads used to fight.”

That wasn’t the way Martha remembered that Christmas; for her, that had been the year Ulrich and Katharina had separated. Martha, Magnus and Mikkel had spent it in their new house with Katharina, not having even bothered to decorate that year, while Ulrich and Hannah had some fancy dinner at Regina Tiedemann’s hotel. Martha did remember the album that Mikkel was talking about; she and Magnus had looked through it several years back, and she thought she would recognise a picture of Mads now, but she didn’t think Mikkel had been part of it.

“I went to the school looking for our mother, but some girl told me that someone called Mr. Huber was the principal instead, and I met someone called Egon at the police station.”

“My great grandfather was called Egon, and he was a cop,” Bartosz said. “He was still working there in 1986. But anyone could have told you that.”

“Mikkel’s not a liar,” Martha interrupted. “He wouldn’t make all of this up.”

“What about all those times when Ulrich had just left, and Mikkel kept pretending he was sick so he could get him over here without Hannah, thinking he could get your parents back together?” Bartosz argued. “Or what about Ulrich? He lied about his affair.”

“That was ages ago,” Martha replied. “But this…it’s all too detailed. Mikkel wouldn’t come up with something like this, with people no one’s ever heard of, and we could always tell that he wasn’t sick at the time you’re talking about. Back then, he thought he was fixing things getting them back together, because he blamed himself for the affair coming out in the first place. This just feels different. And yes, Papa lied about his affair back then, but it doesn’t make sense for him to lie about this. If he wanted to get back with our mother, he’d just try and talk to her about it, not come up with some story about 1986 and how they’d never actually split up at all.”

“Guys, I am here, you know,” Mikkel interrupted.

“Sorry.” Martha apologised. “Bartosz, I get why you’re finding it hard to believe. It doesn’t make sense to me either, but I know Mikkel.” She turned to her brother. “Can you remember which way you went in the caves?”

“You can’t be serious,” Bartosz grabbed her arm; Martha shook him off.

“I have to understand what’s happened here, so that I can help Mikkel. I need to check this story out. I might have to go to 1986.”

Chapter Text

As he started stuffing Hannah’s things into black bags, Ulrich was still trying to process what Claudia had told him, trying to find some way that he could dismiss the possibility entirely. He hadn’t been friends with Michael Kahnwald in school, the age gap being just that bit too big for them to have been friends at the time, (in fact, now he thought about it, he thought he remembered Michael having been out of school for ages, then acting out quite a lot when he got back – wasn’t there an incident with that lunatic guy whose name no one had ever known? He didn’t think he ever knew the details though) and it was only after they’d all left school and Michael and Hannah were seriously dating that Ulrich had really socialised with him. So there hadn’t been a lot of things that he could put his finger on that had happened in the 1980s that might have made sense with Claudia’s explanation. It was insane. He’d had beers with the man, talked to him about things his children had done. Michael Kahnwald was not his son. And yet at the same time, Ulrich remembered things that did fit; all the times Michael had avoided socialising with the Nielsens with some vague explanation, the time Michael had seemed to know exactly how long Martha was going to be upset with Mikkel after one spat and then turned out to be right, Michael’s nervous reaction the first time Katharina asked if he wanted to hold baby Mikkel.

Even if Ulrich did believe it, Mikkel had never been meant to be in 1986. He was meant to be here, with his family, and if he really was Jonas’s father Michael Kahnwald, well, Ulrich had no problem with the person who had lured Mikkel into 1986 through the caves in the first place no longer existing. As for the Dopplers, Peter would probably have been better off being raised by anyone other than Helge, and for all Ulrich knew, Charlotte had most likely been adopted somewhere outside of Winden. But Ulrich wasn’t concerned about that right now; what mattered was fixing his own family, with Katharina, Magnus, Martha and Mikkel, and that started with getting Hannah out of there. In all the confusion, he had never ended up tackling her about her statement to Egon back in 1986; now, with a slightly clearer mind after Claudia had filled in some of the blanks, Ulrich felt he could have that conversation before cutting her out of his life. Now he had to concentrate on finding a way of making things right with Katharina, giving Mikkel back the family he’d expected to be returning to.

Sorry, Killian, Martha thought as she phoned in the anonymous tip off to Winden Police Station about Jurgen Obendorf having removed Erik’s stash from the crappy armchair before the police found out. She didn’t really care about the Obendorfs’ drug dealing one way or the other, but at least if the police were dealing with them, they wouldn’t be pursuing her father.

The thing was, she didn’t entirely blame Magnus for having decided Ulrich needed some sort of help and thinking he needed to intervene. The whole story did sound crazy enough that she hadn’t believed it herself at first, and Magnus had never really forgiven Ulrich over the affair with Hannah and the way it had all gone down. And if Martha did look into it and found nothing to back it up, she’d agree with Magnus that Ulrich needed help, and would go to Torben Woller herself. But if there was any truth in it, she wanted to give him that chance.

Martha even had to admit that Bartosz was right about a lot of it when he tried to rationalise it; everyone did know the date of Chernobyl, and Mikkel would definitely have known Egon Tiedemann’s name after the number of rants they’d all been subjected to over the years about how that so-called incompetent fool had handled Mads’s disappearance and how it had taken some guy sending an anonymous note to get him actually looking at Doppler. But Magnus hadn’t seen everything Martha had as Mikkel told his story, had been more focused in the moment on blaming Ulrich than trying to understand why Mikkel might have been saying it.

She selected 1986 from the newspaper archives; there was the Chernobyl six months on article that Mikkel had mentioned, and something their grandfather had written about Claudia Tiedemann taking over the nuclear plant. A couple of days later there was the big news story about Helge Doppler’s arrest, with Martha’s parents watching as he was led away in handcuffs; someone Martha had never heard of had written that one, she guessed her grandfather wouldn’t be covering stories involving his own family.

Wait a second. It was just a few lines, something that it would have been easy to miss, but there was a story about some child presenting at Winden Police Station with injuries, and he’d been reunited with his father. There were no names mentioned in the story, it could have been a coincidence…but it matched too closely with the story Mikkel was telling.

Impossible as it seemed, it looked like Mikkel was telling the truth, and therefore so was their father.

Claudia stood unseen in the shadows, watching from a distance as Regina adjusted her headscarf, listlessly leafed through the local paper, before setting it down beside her as she fell into a doze.

It was never supposed to have happened this way. Regina’s cancer was never supposed to have reached this advanced a stage as early as November 2019; she was supposed to live, cancer-free and without that excuse for a husband of hers, in the origin world, because Jonas Kahnwald and the other Martha Nielsen were supposed to travel back there to prevent the Tannhaus family’s accident and time travel being created in the first place. Now that Ulrich Nielsen had removed Mikkel from 1986 and Jonas had not been born in this world, everything was in flux and Claudia had no idea what was going to happen. She wasn’t certain why Ulrich Nielsen and his family were still there, unless it was as she had suggested to him before, that he was there long enough to try and right the situation that he had created. And she didn’t know what was going to happen with the apocalypse, whether it would still be in June 2020 as per the time she had come from, any day now as per the timeline in Eva’s universe, or some day yet unknown.

This was not supposed to have been possible; Ulrich was supposed to have taken the other path to 1953, because that was the way it always had happened, and Claudia had no idea how he had managed to make it to 1986. Ulrich’s behaviour was unpredictable; the effects it may have on his family and friends was also unpredictable. At any time, anyone might do something that might unravel the timeline further, that might threaten Regina’s existence in either this timeline or the origin world, and Claudia had to take action to restore everyone to their proper places in the timeline.

As Martha finished typing the message she was sending to Bartosz, as she turned towards the caves, she wondered how good an idea this was. She’d seen the articles that backed up Mikkel’s story, surely that should be enough proof of what happened without needing to go to 1986; yet even as she thought that, she knew that she needed to be sure in her own mind, and going there for herself was the only way of being sure.

But even though the evidence of the newspapers seemed to back up Mikkel’s claims, Martha had another reason for wanting to go back to 1986. She’d seen how unhappy Mikkel had been ever since Katharina had found out about Ulrich’s affair with Hannah, blaming himself, and now the shock for this Mikkel at finding this out, since he had come from a timeline where that never happened. Maybe there was a way that Martha could help him, help them all. If Ulrich tried to win Katharina back on his own, Martha wasn’t confident about his chances. But whatever had happened in 1986 had obviously set events in motion that had led to the breakup of their parents’ marriage; Martha didn’t know what had changed, but maybe there was something she could do in 1986 to prevent that from happening.

There was the crappy armchair; Woller and his team hadn’t got that far yet. Martha hurried towards the entrance to the caves, then stopped as she thought she heard someone calling her name. That had better not be Bartosz and Mikkel, she thought. Mikkel had been through enough in 1986 without going back again.

As she turned around, she saw a blonde guy about her age, wearing a yellow raincoat a bit like her own, for some reason appearing to be covered in some oil-like substance.

“Martha,” he said, “No.”

Martha shook her head angrily, turned away and walked back towards the cave. That was weird, she thought. Why would some strange guy appear like that and try and tell her not to carry on? Who even was that?

But even as she thought that, she realised that she wasn’t sure how she knew, or how she was seeing him anyway, but she did know who that guy was. Mikkel had been talking about him that whole afternoon.

Jonas Kahnwald.

Chapter Text

That was ridiculous, Martha thought as she deliberately turned her back on the guy in the yellow raincoat and walked towards the entrance to the caves. Mikkel’s stories about this Jonas character had obviously been getting to her. At one point he’d even tried to claim that Martha and this Jonas had had crushes on each other, and everyone had been surprised when she’d started dating Bartosz that summer. It was true that Mikkel and Bartosz had never really got along that well, and Martha had discussed with Magnus in the past how it bugged her when Bartosz would do things like hit Mikkel in the back of the head when only Magnus and Martha were allowed to do that, and a part of her wished that they had a relationship more like Mikkel had described with this Jonas, where they would exchange “ultimate fist bumps”.

Why was Martha even thinking about this? Much as that did bug her about Bartosz, *someone who didn’t even exist* (and probably still wouldn’t, whatever ended up happening with Hannah in 1986) was not exactly an alternative, and besides, someone who would lead Mikkel into 1986 was never going to be someone Martha would have wanted anything to do with (if he had done it knowingly, that was; Mikkel had seemed very confused as to how or why this had happened and had been saying he thought it must have been a genuine accident, because nothing else made sense to him). What was the point of wasting any more energy even thinking about this? Yet even as Martha told herself that, she had to admit that she’d felt some kind of strong connection pulling her towards this stranger, something she couldn’t explain.

This was insanity. Martha wasn’t going to think about this any more. She had to carry on, to find out for sure what happened to Mikkel, to try and bring back the timeline he had come from.

Next stop, 1986.

As Ulrich headed over towards the house where Katharina had moved to, he realised he didn’t know quite what he was going to say to her. There was the truth, of course, but Katharina would probably think him as unhinged as Magnus did if he tried explaining that he had come from a timeline where the affair had never happened. Maybe it was a good thing that Katharina was likely to be tied up a bit longer with the meeting about whether or not to kick Erik Obendorf out, that would give him a bit more time to think through how to approach this. While he wasn’t sure how much he would have cared what happened to Erik before all this, knowing that Erik had just been saved from death at the hands of Helge Doppler, Ulrich found himself hoping that Katharina showed Erik some mercy. Erik had a new chance at life, and if he was able to stay on at school, he had a chance of a better future.

Ulrich thought back to his encounter with Jurgen Obendorf, where he had promised to bring Erik home; he had technically achieved that, yet he regretted now that he had been so quick to initially dismiss Erik’s disappearance as another of the times that he’d run away from home. Yes, it was true that time travel had no more been a theory of his at the time than it had been for Egon Tiedemann in 1986, and he’d certainly had no reason to connect Erik with Helge Doppler at the time. Practically every other day Charlotte had come into work with some story about Helge having escaped from his care home, or having called what had been the old house phone number in 1953 repeatedly and then been unable to understand why he wasn’t getting through to Bernd Doppler; he was the last person Ulrich would have seen as any kind of criminal mastermind. It was also true that Erik did have a history of taking off and then turning up after a couple of days when he’d had time to cool off, (this had never been the case with Mads, so there had been less justification, in Ulrich’s mind, for Egon Tiedemann to have considered the possibility of Mads having also run away. There had been an incident right before Mads disappeared when Ulrich, angry with Mads for having eavesdropped on his call to Katharina, had told him to “get lost”; unfortunately, Egon had been present when Mads was telling Regina about this, and had placed more importance on the incident than it had warranted when Mads was first reported missing. Ulrich and Mads had patched it up as they always did; that incident would never have caused Mads to run away, yet Egon had wasted time suspecting Ulrich because of it, and because of his pre-existing dislike, missing clues about Helge Doppler which had been under his nose.) But he still felt that he could have put more effort into the investigation when Erik first disappeared; was he really any better than Tiedemann had been in 1986?

He also thought back to the words he had flung at Claudia about her affair with Tronte and how Mads may not have disappeared had Tronte been home that night; while he still believed this to an extent, Ulrich also had to think back to his own whereabouts the night Mikkel travelled to 1986. He had used the town meeting as an excuse to meet up with Hannah; if he had decided to stay home that night once the babysitter called in sick, which he probably could have done since Charlotte and Katharina had it covered, Mikkel wouldn’t have needed to have gone with Magnus and Martha to the caves, or maybe if Ulrich had been home, Magnus and Martha would have abandoned that plan anyway. Ulrich acknowledged now that his own guilt in Mikkel’s disappearance was just the same as Tronte’s guilt in Mads’s. He had been quick to dismiss Charlotte’s claims that everything was happening in the same way as it had 33 years earlier; it appeared now he would never get the chance to tell her she had been right all along.

But what he would get the chance to do now was to try and be a better police officer and a better family man; he’d already ended the relationship with Hannah and had to concentrate now on finding some way to reconcile with Katharina, to make things better with Magnus and Martha, to keep Mikkel safe in 2019. He’d never be as quick to assume he knew what had happened if he ever got another missing person case again, but would try harder to investigate just as he had vowed he would in 1986. He even thought he’d try and call his mother more often so she wouldn’t keep calling the emergency line at work (Charlotte Doppler had always been very patient with those calls from Jana, probably because she had to deal with worse from Helge; Ulrich wondered whether Torben Woller would have been quite so patient in this timeline).

He walked up the steps towards Katharina’s house; his phone rang, Torben Woller’s number flashing up on the screen. Ulrich declined the call; it immediately rang again, Ulrich caught a glimpse of some message about the Obendorfs before switching it off. Whatever was going on with them, Ulrich couldn’t deal with it now; his priority right now was his family.

Bartosz threw his phone down in frustration after the umpteenth attempt to call Martha and repeatedly getting her voicemail. A part of him still thought the whole thing made no sense and that Mikkel could have easily come up with the story himself (hell, Ulrich had probably kept hold of a copy of that newspaper ever since 1986, so Mikkel would have had all the information to hand. Bartosz had been on the receiving end of some of those rants about his great grandfather himself over the years until Katharina had stepped in and said that maybe Egon’s great grandson wasn’t the audience for that).

But if there really was nothing in it, why wasn’t Martha back by now, and why wasn’t she contactable? Martha was right in that it wasn’t like Mikkel, and even if it had started out as a prank, he wouldn’t have taken it this far. Magnus had texted, asking what was happening, and Bartosz wasn’t sure how to reply to him. Mikkel, meanwhile, after having spent the few hours crying as he tried to explain everything, had finally fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion.

Thank God for that, Bartosz thought as he heard someone walking into the house. Hopefully it would be Martha, or if not her, at least one of the family who he could hand Mikkel over to. But the woman who walked in was someone he didn’t know, or at least he didn’t think he did; when Bartosz took a closer look, he realised there was something about her that was familiar in some way.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Claudia Tiedemann,” the woman said, “and I am your grandmother.”

“My grandmother is dead.” Yet as soon as Bartosz said it, he looked at her again; he had seen photos of his grandmother from the 1980s, this woman did look like she could have been the same person.

“I will explain everything later. For now, I am here for the boy.”

“Like hell you are.” Bartosz hadn’t heard Ulrich arrive. “How did you even get in here? You are not taking Mikkel. Get out of this house.”

“He has to be returned to 1986,” Claudia went on. “I understand that you would do anything to protect your child. But I would do the same for mine. The timeline must be as it always has been, so that Regina can live.”

“Wait.” Bartosz stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

“If the timeline is restored to what it was meant to be, your mother will live. She will live out her full life, cancer-free.”

Okay, on the one hand it made no sense to Bartosz that whether or not Mikkel was in 2019 would have any effect on Regina’s health, but at the same time, nothing else had made sense that day either. Bartosz flashed back to that day, the week before, when Regina had been told that they were looking at weeks, months if they were lucky; it was the only time he had ever seen Aleksander cry.

“You promise she’ll be okay?”

Claudia nodded.

“Then let’s do what has to be done.”

Ulrich looked at him. “I’m sorry.”

Bartosz frowned. “For what?”

The next thing Bartosz felt was Ulrich’s fist connecting with his jaw.

As Claudia leapt for Mikkel, Ulrich shoved her out of the way; not looking to see her fall, he reached out for Mikkel, shook him awake.

“Papa? What’s going on?”

Claudia had insisted that returning Mikkel to 1986 was the only way; yet there was something else Ulrich could do, to keep Mikkel safe in 2019 once and for all.

“We’re getting the hell out of Winden.”

Chapter Text

Ulrich sped through the streets, past Winden School for the Deaf, past what had been Regina Tiedemann’s hotel but now appeared to be up for sale. Mikkel watched the town that had been the only home he had ever known passing him by, unable to understand what was going on. With Martha finally believing him, he’d thought there might actually be a chance of getting the family back together as they had been, as Mikkel still wasn’t sure he understood why they weren’t. Now it looked like they were only going to be pulled further apart, and it was all his fault.

Was there anything different Mikkel could have done? He could have pulled away from Jonas, tried to hide somewhere else, or even just tried to stick close to one of the others instead, and maybe never have ended up in 1986 – but he’d had no reason to think that he’d need to do that. Jonas had been best friends with Martha and Magnus for years along with Bartosz, Mikkel had grown up with him always being around, and he’d been the one of his siblings’ friends that Mikkel had always liked the best; if there was anyone that Mikkel would have said he could have trusted to get him home, it would have been Jonas. Besides, Mikkel still thought that it could have been a mistake, and Jonas hadn’t known they would end up in 1986.

Should he have said he could stay home by himself when Magnus and Martha went out, that he wasn’t a baby and could take care of himself? He could have said it, and Magnus had sure looked pissed off about having had to take Mikkel with them, maybe Magnus could have been persuaded to have let him stay home just that once. He and Martha might have got in trouble with Katharina when she got home, but at least none of this would have happened.

Martha had been talking about their father and how the Mikkel she had known had blamed himself for the way his affair with Hannah came out; while an older Mikkel could see, listening to the story, that that hadn’t been the case, that it all sounded like a horrible coincidence that Hannah’s message had come through just as Katharina had looked at the phone, he did blame himself for having got lost in 1986 in the first place, for having caused everything that had happened ever since their trip to the caves. Jonas didn’t exist any more, and he was the only one who seemed to care.

“Once we get out of Winden, get settled somewhere,” Ulrich was saying, “I’ll send for your mother, and Martha and Magnus. We can all be together again.” He slammed his foot on the accelerator as they passed the care home where Helge Doppler used to live, racing past Mikkel’s grandparents’ place, heading on the road out of Winden.

“Papa, we can’t leave!” Mikkel burst out at last.

“It doesn’t have to be forever,” Ulrich began, focusing on the road in front of him, “and I promise, I’ll get your mother and Magnus and Martha to join us. But we don’t need to be in Winden to be together, and we can’t stay in Winden, not while Claudia Tiedemann is trying to take you back. You’re safe with me now, and my priority is to keep you safe.”

“But you don’t understand. It’s Martha. She went to 1986.”

Well, the armchair had gone, Martha noticed as she stepped out of the caves. So, either Woller’s team had taken it away as part of the investigation into the Obendorfs, or…Martha really had made it to 1986.

She ran through the forest paths, a part of her still not quite convinced that she’d even made it this far. Maybe she’d get round the corner and find Bartosz waiting to take her back home, posters for 2019 events, anything to show her that this had all been a wild goose chase. But maybe she wouldn’t; maybe this was the timeline Mikkel had described.

Martha had reached the main road now; she ran towards the bus shelter, read the posters prominently displayed on the wall.

Okay. This had to be 1986, because they were missing posters for Mads Nielsen, last seen in October 1986, and the boy in the photograph was definitely the same person she’d seen pictures of in her family’s albums. As Martha watched, some guy drove past in a laundrette van; Sebastian Kruger, Hannah’s father. He’d died when Martha was about six years old, Martha thought, before wondering how she could remember that so exactly when she barely remembered the guy (since he’d died several years before her father and Hannah had begun their affair, he’d never really become part of her life, just someone she’d see in the street sometimes.)

An image popped into her head; she was standing in the playground at her old school, with Magnus and Bartosz, and a girl with red hair who she felt like she should know, but couldn’t quite place. A boy approached them, upset, saying his grandfather had died the night before. Just as had happened before she went into the caves, Martha knew without being told that this was Jonas Kahnwald.

What even was this? How was Martha now having memories of someone who never actually existed?

This could not be happening.

Ulrich slammed on the brakes, part of him thinking he should turn around and head back towards the caves he had sworn that none of the Nielsen family would ever set foot in again, go back to 1986 and get Martha the hell out of there. The other part of him knew that if Mikkel stayed in Winden any longer, Claudia Tiedemann could catch up with them and try and forcibly take him back there.

“She wanted to try and understand what happened, and Bartosz didn’t believe any of it,” Mikkel tried to explain. “What if she gets stuck there, like I did until you came to rescue me?”

Okay. He had to think. If Martha did somehow get trapped in 1986 herself, Ulrich was the only person who could rescue her. Yet at the same time, Martha was going in there with her eyes open, would probably be better able than Mikkel to get herself back home. And this time, they had options – since Ulrich and Mikkel knew where Martha was, and Bartosz at least knew what she had been trying to do, it would be possible for someone to go in after her and try to rescue her if needed (they could try contacting Magnus or Katharina, but that ran the risk of not being believed). Whereas if Ulrich left Mikkel here to go after Martha himself, that risked Claudia going after Mikkel again, and there was no way he was taking Mikkel with him if he did try rescuing Martha. He wasn’t taking the chance on Mikkel getting stuck there.

“Take my phone out of my jacket pocket,” Ulrich said at last. “Text Magnus and try and explain it all to him. Ask him to go into the caves and try and rescue Martha himself if she’s not back by tomorrow. Right now, I have to keep you safe from Claudia and from 1986. We have to carry on out of Winden.”

He slammed his foot down on the accelerator, continuing on his path out of town.

Was trying to find Hannah such a good idea? Martha wasn’t sure any more. Maybe it would be better for her to just get out of there, back to her own time. She knew now that Mikkel was telling the truth about what happened; she just kept going back and forth on how good an idea it was to change the timeline any more than it had already been changed. Yes, she could try and do something here that would stop her father and Hannah getting together in 2016, but she was no longer sure that would guarantee restoring the timeline Mikkel knew. And after these strange flashes she was getting of this Jonas person that Mikkel had kept talking about, Martha thought maybe being in a familiar timeline might orient her better, stop this from happening. She’d be better off leaving things as they were, heading back home to Mikkel. Bartosz was probably getting pretty pissed off at having to look after him alone, unless Magnus or her mother had arrived home now.

Wait. There was Hannah, just ahead of her, looking as though she didn’t want to be seen. Martha followed, watching as Hannah hid behind trees, peering around them in the direction of some other people in the forest….as Martha followed her gaze, she flashed back to that old photo album she’d looked at ages ago, and realised that the people Hannah was trying not to be seen by were her parents. Katharina seemed to be angrily confronting someone, kneeing her in the stomach, and Ulrich, while angry, seemed less so and seemed to be trying to calm Katharina down; as Katharina moved slightly, Martha caught a glimpse of the person she was confronting. Martha remembered seeing a picture of this person with Mads in the album; she realised she was looking at a younger Regina Tiedemann.

Instinctively, Martha ducked; part of her knew this was illogical as Katharina, Ulrich, Regina and Hannah would never recognise her, but at the same time she acknowledged that another part of it was that she didn’t think she really wanted to see her parents like this. She had known that her parents and Bartosz’s had always tolerated each other at social occasions, but never really been friends; maybe whatever was happening here had been what started this off.

A young man approached; Martha didn’t immediately recognise him, and she got the impression that the others didn’t either, but it looked to her like he was coming to the defence of Regina, confronting Ulrich and Katharina. Ulrich looked like he wanted to lead Katharina away, and Martha thought, hoped, that that was the end of the incident, but Katharina looked like she wanted to have one last word, and as Martha watched, the man pulled out a gun.

Forgetting all thoughts of staying hidden, thinking only of protecting her parents, Martha ran towards them, yelling “No, you don’t!” as she tackled the man with the gun trying to get him to the ground. As they struggled, as Regina screamed, Martha heard the sound of a gunshot, saw the man collapse to the floor, bleeding.

“Run!” Ulrich yelled, grabbing Katharina by the hand and dragging her through the forest; Regina continued screaming, while from her vantage point behind the tree, Hannah remained frozen to the spot.

Martha picked up two documents that the man had dropped; they appeared to be passports. The name Boris Niewald in one of them meant nothing to her, but although she’d never known him under that name, she did know who Aleksander Kohler, the name in the other one, was. Unless she was very much mistaken, she’d just shot Bartosz’s father.

Chapter Text

As Torben Woller hung up the phone, part of him was tempted to throw it across the room. He’d just had Hannah ranting at him down the phone for the last ten minutes about how she’d come home to find Ulrich had packed up all her stuff and left it outside in black bags and now wouldn’t answer her calls, and had eventually had to interrupt her to say that Hannah and Ulrich’s relationship issues were nothing to do with him, he was Ulrich’s boss, not his therapist. Didn’t Winden used to have a man who could actually deal with this?

Having said that, it was true that Torben had been having trouble reaching Ulrich himself that day. He’d been trying to reach him to come and help deal with the Obendorf case after the anonymous call he’d received with the tip off about where Jurgen and Erik kept their stash, but had ended up having to handle it all himself because Ulrich kept declining all his calls. And as if that wasn’t enough, there had also been a call about someone having escaped the psych ward. While Torben wasn’t going to get involved in whatever was going on with Ulrich and Hannah, he did need Ulrich to have his mind on the job, and also to be able to do the job himself without Hannah calling him every five minutes. He picked up his phone to call Ulrich again, but was interrupted by Magnus Nielsen bursting into the police station.

“It’s Papa, he’s lost it, he and Mikkel keep talking about Mikkel getting stuck in 1986 and Papa rescuing him, it’s like they don’t even remember Papa marrying Hannah, they keep talking about people no one’s ever heard of, and now I got this message…” He broke off as his phone started ringing. “Mama…wait, what? Okay, I’m with Chief Woller now. We’ll be right over.” Magnus hung up. “And Mama just got back from the school to find Papa’s taken Mikkel, and Bartosz and Claudia Tiedemann unconscious in the house.” He shoved his phone at Torben. “Here. This is what they just sent me.”

Torben stared at the message. “Martha is…stuck in 1986?”

“I know, it makes no sense, but I’ve been trying to get hold of Martha and I can’t reach her either. I’m not sure I believe that she’s in 1986, but I do feel like something’s happened to her.”

“Okay, let me try contacting him again,” Torben began, hitting Ulrich’s number in his call list; it rang a few times before going to voicemail. “Ulrich, this is Torben. I need you to call me when you get this please.”

“We don’t have time to wait for him,” Magnus began, but as he said it, Torben noticed a message flash up on his phone from Ulrich’s number.

“Old Marburg Road?” he repeated.

“Mikkel must still have the phone,” Magnus realised. “He’s letting you know where they are, so that someone can go and rescue him.”

“The Old Marburg Road…” Torben thought to himself. “Going from Katharina’s, Ulrich probably went through the city, past the old hotel and the care home. If I take the short cut along the back road, I can probably cut him off if I set off now.”

“I’m coming with you,” Magnus replied.

Torben was about to say no, but then thought maybe it would be a good idea for Mikkel to have one of his family there when Ulrich was apprehended. “Fine. Get in the passenger seat.”

Hannah drummed her fingers impatiently as she sat parked up just down the road from Katharina’s house, half expecting any minute that Ulrich would turn up. This had come out of nowhere; one minute things had been fine between them, and the next minute Ulrich was talking as though he had never divorced Katharina, and her bags were on their doorstep? She couldn’t understand what was going on; since Ulrich wasn’t answering her calls, Hannah would wait outside Katharina’s, see if he was going to turn up there throwing himself on her mercy. If anyone had asked Hannah a week earlier, even two days earlier, she would have doubted that Katharina would have had any mercy to spare for him; Katharina had been adamant up to then that she would engage with Ulrich on matters relating to their children, but now that their divorce was long since finalised, they had no reason to interact other than that. But today, with everything Hannah thought she knew turned upside down, she no longer felt confident of that.

There she was. As Hannah watched, Katharina tapped at something on her phone, got into her car and set off at speed towards Marburg. Was that Ulrich texting her? Hannah wondered, deciding on instinct to follow her, see if her so-called husband and his ex-wife really were meeting up. At the very least, she was owed some answers, and since no one else seemed to be giving her any, this was the only way.

Mikkel wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing. On the one hand, his father was right in that if they did stick around, that woman – Bartosz’s grandmother, although Mikkel still didn’t understand how that could be, since he remembered Bartosz saying that she was dead – might try and take him back to 1986. He wanted to be here, in his own time, although he really wanted to be in the time when his parents were still together and Jonas was still around, rather than this time where nothing made sense.

But on the other hand, whatever his father said, he still didn’t feel he could leave Martha in 1986. Yes, he’d texted Magnus, but Magnus hadn’t seemed to believe it when Mikkel had first tried to explain it to him, so Mikkel wasn’t sure how much he could count on him, and Bartosz had been unconscious when they’d left him; if he had a concussion, he wasn’t going to be able to get to 1986 and rescue Martha himself.

It might be okay. She really might just go there for long enough to prove to herself that it was true and then leave again, might be on her way back home now. But Mikkel didn’t really believe that that was true, felt more worried about her the longer things went on without hearing from her, and if his father really did take him miles away from Winden, there was nothing he could do about it.

Papa wasn’t going to be happy if Torben Woller did come after them and stop them getting out of Winden, and Mikkel wished there had been some other way. But Mikkel thought now that by sending Woller that message, he had done the right thing; at least this way they had a chance of saving Martha.

Not far now, Ulrich thought to himself, and then they’d be across the town line and out of Winden. He still didn’t know where they’d go once they were out of town; maybe he didn’t need to have a destination in mind, just anywhere that Claudia wouldn’t know to look for them.

Great, he thought as he realised that there was a car blocking the road, then as he got closer he realised that Torben Woller was getting out, handcuffs in hand, while Magnus flung open the passenger door, running towards them and calling Mikkel’s name. They had been so close, and yet now so far.

Ulrich slowly got out of his car, raised his hands in surrender. As Torben cuffed him, Mikkel ran towards Magnus, sobbing “I had to tell him where we were, Papa. I couldn’t leave Martha. I’m sorry. I caused this, I have to fix it.”

“You caused nothing, Mikkel. You are not to blame for anything.” There was Jonas, of course, who had led Mikkel into the caves, Ulrich himself choosing to use the town meeting to meet up with Hannah and leaving Mikkel with no choice but to join Magnus and Martha in the caves, but Mikkel was not to blame for anything at all.

“Ulrich, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me,” Torben began, and for a moment Ulrich briefly imagined resisting, but knew it would prove useless.

“Here’s Mama now, come to take you back home,” Magnus tried to reassure Mikkel, pointing towards Katharina’s car which was just coming around the corner. “Wait…what’s that idiot doing?”

“Idiot!” Katharina yelled at the person who’d been driving erratically behind her for the last mile. If that driver got any closer, they’d be right in the back of her car. That was the last thing she needed on this day of all days. She still wasn’t sure she’d got the sense of the situation even after reading all of Magnus’s messages, but it sounded like Ulrich had taken leave of his senses. After everything that had happened when she had thrown him out, Ulrich was now saying he had no memory of being married to Hannah at all, and was trying to leave town with Mikkel?

There they were; they’d managed to get to Ulrich in time before he got too far. Chief Woller had Ulrich in cuffs, while Mikkel was clinging to Magnus for dear life. As Katharina slowed down, she realised the other driver hadn’t, and was continuing towards her at great speed; as she looked in the mirror, she realised she knew exactly who it was.

“Ulrich!” Hannah screamed, recognising her husband being cuffed and led towards the back of Torben Woller’s car, as Magnus tried to calm Mikkel down. She’d been so sure she was following Katharina to some kind of secret assignation with Ulrich; instead she seemed to have arrived in the middle of something else altogether, and no one had even tried to make contact with her to let her know her husband was being arrested!

“Shit!” she hissed under her breath as she realised that while she’d been distracted watching Ulrich, Katharina had slowed down; Hannah stamped hard on her brakes, too late to stop herself from driving straight into the back of Katharina’s car.

“Katharina!” Ulrich yelled, struggling against his restraints to try and get to her; Hannah had got out of her car now and was attempting to get to Ulrich, while Katharina remained slumped forward in the driver’s seat.

“Officer Jankowski will take care of her,” Torben explained, gesturing towards his backup who had just arrived. “I’m going to need you to come with me. Magnus, you’d better get Mikkel out of here. Maybe call your grandparents.”

“None of this was meant to happen,” came a new voice; Ulrich groaned as he realised Claudia had arrived, accompanied by a woman he thought he recognised, but couldn’t place.

The woman took a few tentative steps towards him; Mikkel’s mouth dropped open in horror as he got a look at her face.

Wait a minute. No. That couldn’t be.

“Papa?”

Chapter Text

Instinctively, Martha reached for her phone, before remembering that it was useless here. “Hey, you! Asshole!” she yelled to Hannah, who was still crouching in the forest hoping not to be seen. “Go get help!” As Hannah ran off, Martha turned to Regina. “Okay, we’re going to need to try and slow the bleeding while we wait for help to arrive.”

“He was never actually going to shoot them!” Regina burst out. “Why did you have to do that?”

“I couldn’t be sure of that at the time,” Martha went on. “Okay, Regina, you’re going to need to apply pressure to the wound, right here.”

Regina stared at her. “Wait. How did you know my name?”

Shit. “That’s not important right now,” Martha evaded the question. “Just keep applying pressure right here, and he’s going to be fine.”

“You don’t know that,” Regina snapped as Aleksander groaned.

Martha knew she couldn’t say that yes she did, because she knew Aleksander and Regina as a married couple in 2019 and was dating their son; since Aleksander and Bartosz existed in the timeline she had come from, she was sure that Aleksander would survive this, that help would come, despite her lack of trust in Hannah and already wondering if she’d done the right thing by sending Hannah to get help rather than going herself. On the other hand, a part of her found herself wondering if her actions here today had changed the timeline, whether she would get to 2019 and find that this time, Bartosz was the person that nobody else remembered because Aleksander had not lived to become his father.

There was Hannah now, with Sebastian Kruger, a man Martha had never met but knew as soon as Regina called out “Opa!” that he must be Egon Tiedemann, a few people Martha didn’t recognise who had come from the hospital. As one nurse approached, Martha realised that her name tag read Ines Kahnwald.

As soon as Martha saw the name, that face of the young man in the yellow raincoat flashed before her eyes again; Jonas Kahnwald at the lake with her, Magnus and Bartosz, saying he had to leave early because he was helping Grandma Ines set her tablet up, but he’d see her at her parents’ silver wedding party.

“Grandma Ines?” Martha repeated.

Ines Kahnwald looked at her oddly. “No, I have no grandchildren.” Of course she didn’t, Martha knew that perfectly well, and she also knew that no such silver wedding party had ever happened because Ulrich and Katharina had divorced before they reached that milestone. “Jonas Kahnwald, saying he needed to set up Grandma Ines’s tablet. That can’t have happened. So why am I remembering it?”

“Who’s Jonas?” Hannah asked. “And what’s a tablet?”

“Okay, this isn’t actually as bad as it looked,” Ines turned to Regina. “You did good here trying to stem the flow of bleeding. We are going to need to get him to the hospital, but I’m confident that your friend is going to be fine.”

Martha barely heard her; she was trying to make sense of everything that had just happened. Those glimpses of Jonas Kahnwald by the caves, in the yellow raincoat, covered in oil, she could maybe just about accept that (well, maybe the oil didn’t mean much to her, but the rest she could understand). Mikkel had been talking about him all day, enough that Martha got some kind of sense of the person he was describing (although Mikkel hadn’t described him physically that much, apart from the yellow raincoat that he practically lived in and Magnus had once made a joke about him sleeping in it). But these memories of him, of things that Martha knew could never possibly have happened and yet she could still remember them…she couldn’t explain that.

Jonas flashed before Martha’s eyes again, yelling something she couldn’t make out.

“I can’t understand you, Jonas,” Martha yelled. “What are you trying to tell me? What do you want from me?”

“Jonas?” Egon Tiedemann repeated. “Is that this young man’s name?”

Regina shook her head, gesturing with one of the passports (Hannah had pocketed the other, unnoticed by anyone but Martha). “This says his name is Aleksander Kohler. I don’t know who Jonas is.”

This was a mistake. Martha should never have got involved in this situation; she should have known that she didn’t need to jump in, that Aleksander had never really shot her parents in 1986. She had to get back to 2019; maybe there, things would start making sense again. Trying to do something to the timeline to recover the one that Mikkel remembered was going to cause more harm than good; Martha should leave it alone

“So, would someone like to tell me what just happened here?” Egon Tiedemann asked.

“It was her!” Hannah yelled, pointing at Martha as she attempted to make a run from the scene. “I saw it. That girl shot him.”

Oh, fuck.

As Egon approached Martha with his cuffs, Martha finally realised what Jonas had been trying to say to her.

Run!

“You better stick to the story,” Hannah hissed in Regina’s ear as the two waited in the uncomfortable chairs in Winden Police Station’s waiting room. “Don’t go telling your Opa that it was Ulrich and Katharina who shot him, like you did last time when you got Ulrich arrested.”

“Give it up, Hannah,” Regina retorted. “Everyone knows that was you. And if Ulrich ever uses his brain once in a while, eventually he’ll figure that out too.”

Hannah flinched back in shock; Regina couldn’t blame her, considering this was probably the first time she’d ever actually talked back to one of Katharina’s little acolytes. “Me?” Hannah quickly recovered herself, plastering an innocent look on her face. “Ulrich is one of my best friends. Why would I want to see him end up behind bars?”

“Because you don’t want to see him and Katharina together,” Regina replied, feeling like laughing in Hannah’s face. “Everyone in school knows you’re obsessed with Ulrich. They’re just too scared of Katharina to say anything.” If Regina was honest with herself, she was probably still too scared of Katharina herself to have said anything if Katharina had been there with them, but she had no qualms any more about saying it to Hannah. “I had no reason to go to Opa. Why would I even care what Ulrich and Katharina do? I don’t like them, but that doesn’t mean I want to get them in trouble. Whereas you…if Ulrich got into trouble, and he thought Katharina had reported him, or that her mother had made her and he decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, then that would leave you to pick up the pieces. Or maybe you just wanted to see him locked up, so that if you couldn’t have him then nobody could. I don’t know. I don’t really care. But you had a lot more reason to give a false statement than I ever did, and one day Ulrich will see that.”

Hannah froze; Regina said nothing for a minute. “You don’t have to worry,” she said at last. “I’m not going to say any of that to Ulrich and Katharina. It’s nothing to do with me. And I’m going to tell Opa what really happened, that it was that girl. Who was she, anyway?”

Hannah shrugged. “I never saw her before in my life.”

“Really?” Regina asked. “I thought she must have been a friend of Ulrich or Katharina. It kind of seemed to me like when she thought Aleksander was going to shoot them, she was trying to protect them. Or maybe just Ulrich. You really don’t know who she is?”

Actually, Regina had had the impression that the stranger really was trying to protect them both, rather than specifically Ulrich. But she was quite happy to let Hannah worry about what this person was to Ulrich. Katharina wouldn’t have gone after her that day if it hadn’t been for Hannah’s lies; Regina had no problem with letting Hannah worry for a while. And if Hannah was going to worry about whether Regina would tell Ulrich or Katharina that she was the one who made the false report, well, Regina could live with that as well.

She hoped they’d call her in quickly to give her statement, so she could get to the hospital. Ines Kahnwald may have said that Aleksander’s injury wasn’t as bad as it looked and she thought he was going to be okay, but Regina would feel happier if she could see him for herself. This guy had saved her from Ulrich and Katharina despite that being the first moment they’d met, given her the confidence to stand up to Hannah; it was the first time since Mads disappeared that Regina had felt that someone was in her corner. That strange girl might have seemed confident that Aleksander was going to be okay, but Regina wouldn’t relax until she had seen it for herself; even though she hadn’t been the one who pulled the trigger, she still felt that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been protecting her.

Much as Hannah had tried to ignore Regina’s words, they still ate away at her as she followed Egon Tiedemann into the interview room. She hadn’t got the impression that either Ulrich or Katharina did know that girl until Regina had pointed out that she had seemed like she was protecting them, but then Hannah was the year below them, she knew they had some older friends who she didn’t know. For all Hannah knew, this girl could have been one of them. But whoever she was, if Hannah could keep her away from Ulrich, she would.

Egon seemed to be looking at her suspiciously as she took her seat; Hannah wondered if he was looking at her knowing that she lied in her statement to him about Ulrich a few days earlier. Since they’d ended up letting him go, they must have decided her word wasn’t enough to keep him locked up; Hannah was relieved by that. She’d made her statement in a moment of lashing out, having realised that Ulrich had chosen Katharina and always would, but she hadn’t given much thought to the consequences of her words. Maybe she’d thought that Ulrich would believe Katharina had made the statement, or that the accusation had come from her mother, and Ulrich would decide that Katharina wasn’t worth the trouble. (She tried to ignore the disloyal voice that thought that if she couldn’t have Ulrich, she didn’t want anyone else to have him either, and that in the moment of giving her statement to Egon, she had imagined the possibility of Ulrich being locked up for a very long time. But when the first couple of days had gone by and they were still holding him, Hannah started to face the possibility that he really might never come back, that she’d never get to see him again, never talk about the possibility of a world without Winden, never have the chance of a future with him.)

Egon asked Hannah why she’d been following Ulrich and Katharina, but hiding from them; that was easy enough, Hannah just said something about how she was worried in case they worked out that she had been the one who had given the statement. As for the guy named Aleksander, again she could truthfully say that she’d never seen him before and had no idea who he was (she didn’t mention the passport she had picked up at the scene with another name inside; at that point she thought it better to keep it to herself for a while, just in case she ever needed the information).

Then Egon came to ask about the girl who had tackled Aleksander to the floor; Hannah confirmed that she had never met her before that day.

“Which of them pulled out the gun?” Egon asked, and Hannah was about to say Aleksander, but then remembered Regina’s words about how the girl had seemed to be protecting Ulrich. “I’m not certain”, she said instead. “By the time I actually got a good look, the two of them looked to be fighting over the gun. But that girl was acting really strangely. She was talking to someone who wasn’t there, saying some weird things. She was scary.”

“In your view,” Egon began, “did this young woman deliberately pull the trigger to shoot Aleksander Kohler?”

Hannah took a deep breath, thought of Ulrich as she replied “Yes.”

Chapter Text

“Chief Dohring, I am glad I have seen you,” Jana Nielsen began. “I must insist that you assign Mads’s case to a competent member of your team. How can I have any confidence that Egon Tiedemann will handle our case fairly? He only just let Ulrich go after holding him in your cells for a few days when he had done nothing, and now he’s been holding him for questioning again about a shooting done by someone else.”

“Should never have been allocated in the first place,” Tronte snorted. “Egon was a fool back when I first came here in ’53, and as far as I can see nothing has changed.”

“My understanding was that Ulrich was called for questioning in the capacity of a witness,” Martin Dohring began. “It was clear from witness statements that there had never been any question of your son having pulled the trigger. As for Mads’s case, I’ll talk to Officer Tiedemann. It may be that you are able to salvage the relationship. If not, I will look to assign someone else to the case.”

“Your son is not entirely innocent in this matter,” Egon interrupted. “From what I understand, this incident began when your son and his girlfriend attacked my granddaughter, and the young man who was shot had been trying to protect her.”

“I want him taken off the case,” Jana stood her ground. “Let’s go home. Katharina, Tronte will drop you off at home on the way.”

“So what did happen in there?” Dohring asked as the Nielsens and Katharina Albers left the station, Egon staring at Ulrich with loathing. Ulrich’s parting words to him from the last time he was arrested sounded in his ears: “Maybe it’s a cancer. You should get that checked out.” He thought uncomfortably of the specialist’s letter in his pocket which he hadn’t even opened yet, then dismissed it from his mind. Ulrich was just mouthing off; he couldn’t have known anything about that.

“They’re telling the same story,” Egon began. “Neither Ulrich Nielsen nor Katharina Albers admitted to having ever met that girl before, or Kohler, and don’t know why she would have tackled Kohler to the ground to save them. They seemed to think the gun went off by a genuine accident. Or so they say.”

“You don’t believe that?” Dohring asked. “It seems to fit with Regina’s story.”

“Hannah Kruger was adamant that the other girl had intended to shoot Kohler,” Egon replied.

“Hannah Kruger was adamant that Ulrich Nielsen had forced himself on Katharina,” Dohring pointed out, “but Katharina was equally adamant that that wasn’t what happened, and there was no other evidence to contradict her.”

“Both of them were strangers to Winden; maybe they have some history we didn’t know about. Maybe when Kohler’s out of surgery he’ll be able to answer that.” Egon persisted.

“We’ve had this conversation before, Egon,” Dohring reminded him. “It’s 1986, not 1956. We go by evidence here, and whatever you may think of Ulrich Nielsen, all the evidence in this case suggests that he’s not guilty of any crime. What I’d like to know is what Kohler was doing out there with a gun in the first place.”

Egon was about to argue, but then conceded that his chief may have had a point; Kohler may have been protecting Regina when he pulled the gun on Nielsen, but based on what little he knew of him so far, Egon did think it was probably worth checking him out before his granddaughter spent too much time with him. “Oh, don’t you worry. I’ll be having a little talk with him once he wakes up. So, how did you get on with that girl?”

“Not well,” Dohring replied. “She says she believed Kohler was going to shoot Ulrich and Katharina, that she tackled him to the ground to stop him, and in the confusion the gun went off. That tallies well enough with what Regina, Ulrich and Katharina have all said; not so much with Hannah Kruger. But she won’t tell me her name, where she’s from, why she got involved in the first place if she really doesn’t know any of those kids. Regina said something about her talking to someone who wasn’t there?”

Egon nodded. “Someone called Jonas. No one’s admitting to knowing who that is either, but there was definitely nobody there in the direction she was yelling. She said something a bit odd to Ines Kahnwald as well, called her Grandma Ines.”

“Come in with me and see if you can get anything more out of her,” Dohring suggested. “Sebastian Kruger’s taking Hannah home, and he said he’d drop Regina since I couldn’t reach Claudia at the plant. This girl won’t even give the name of anyone to contact for her.”

Egon followed him in, taking a seat opposite the young woman. Looking at her closer up, Egon thought she looked familiar in some way, although he couldn’t put his finger on who she reminded him of.

“My name is Egon Tiedemann,” Egon began. “Are you going to tell me yours?”

“I have to get out of here,” the girl said without answering his question. “I have to get back.”

“We can arrange for you to get home as soon as you’ve answered our questions,” Egon continued. “You were seen out there talking to someone called Jonas, although there was no one of that name present. Can you tell me who Jonas is?”

“I don’t know,” the girl replied.

“So, you were talking to someone and yet you don’t know who he is?” Dohring raised his eyebrows. “Someone who nobody else could see?”

Egon held up his hand. “Okay, let’s talk about what happened back there.”

“I thought he was going to shoot,” the girl muttered. “So I tried to stop him.”

“You were trying to protect Ulrich Nielsen and Katharina Albers,” Egon mused. “Can I ask why you did that?”

“Is there any kind of…connection between you and Katharina, or you and Ulrich?” Dohring asked.

The girl flinched back in disgust. “What the hell are you trying to say?”

“That seems a very strong reaction, for someone who supposedly never met Ulrich and Katharina, or any of them, before today,” Egon said. “Want to tell us why you reacted like that?”

“Because he’s my father!”

Egon flashed back to a few days earlier, Mikkel Nielsen stood before him telling him Ulrich was his father and that he worked at the police station…how could this girl have known any of that?

The girl took a deep breath. “My name is Martha Nielsen. I’m from the future. Ulrich Nielsen is my father, Katharina’s my mother. And Mikkel, who you met before, he’s my brother.”

Dohring stared at her. “You’re…from the future.” Egon saw his lips twitch, as though he were trying not to laugh. “Okay, want to tell me our chances of winning the next World Cup? Eurovision? How about our next president?”

Egon shook his head at him. Turning back to Martha, he asked “Who is Jonas?”

“I don’t even know,” Martha went on. “Mikkel says he used to be our friend, that he led him through the caves until they ended up in 1986. I didn’t know him. At least I don’t think I did. But I keep thinking I see him, that I remember events including him that I know can’t have happened. I saw him out there. It’s like there’s this whole new timeline ever since Papa brought Mikkel back to 2019.”

“This is the same kind of nonsense we heard from Doppler,” Dohring snorted. “I’m taking her to the cells, and then I’m going to put in a call to the ward.”

“Don’t be so hasty,” Egon began, but Dohring silenced him. “Evidence. That’s what I’ve said to you before. We don’t base evidence on hunches, and the facts all state that we should take her down.”

On the face of it, Egon could understand why his chief had requested that his suspect be taken to the psych ward; this tale of time travel and seeing someone who wasn’t there made little sense. Yet something had seemed off about her story, something he couldn’t put his finger on.

He picked up his Rubik’s Cube that had been solved very quickly by Mikkel Nielsen, shuffled it absent mindedly before it suddenly occurred to him what had seemed wrong with Martha’s story. Dohring had thought Martha had just read about Mikkel in the newspaper, but even if she had read that piece about him having been reunited with his father, no names had been given to the press. So for Martha to have known Mikkel’s name, she would have had to at least met him.

Egon thought back to the day when Mikkel’s father had collected him. When the other Ulrich Nielsen had arrived, Egon had accepted the explanation that it was just a coincidence that Mikkel’s father had the same name as the local troublemaker, and this wasn’t some idiotic prank that the Ulrich he knew had put Mikkel up to after all. But now that Egon thought back, he remembered that Mikkel’s father had seemed jumpy at the sight of the younger Ulrich and Jana. “You see that kid over there?” he had said. “Funny story. His name’s Ulrich Nielsen too.” When Mikkel’s father had said that that was a coincidence and as far as he knew they weren’t related, had he laughed just that bit too loud? Egon hadn’t noticed at the time, but thinking about it now, maybe…

Egon caught himself. Time travel? If he went too far down that line of thinking, he’d probably end up sharing Martha’s cell. But at the very least, he thought it warranted a conversation with Mikkel’s father. Hopefully he was still in town and hadn’t yet left as he had said he intended to. Egon looked for the paperwork that Ulrich Nielsen had signed when he had collected Mikkel, searching for the contact number that he had taken down never really expecting to need again but had been required to note on record at the time. Odd-looking number, he thought as he looked at it; it certainly didn’t look like a Winden telephone number. Egon dialled it anyway just to see what happened; he was not altogether surprised to find that the number was not recognised.

He thought about the anonymous letter delivered to Winden Police Station after the Nielsens had left, telling him to take a long hard look at Helge Doppler in Mads Nielsen’s missing persons case. Helge had seemed almost relieved to confess when Egon had spoken to him; since he had volunteered his confession willingly, Egon hadn’t really looked into where the anonymous letter had come from in the first place. While Egon had got as far as wondering about the route that Helge had taken to get home on the day Mads disappeared, he did wonder now what would have put the anonymous sender on to Helge; he had never been named publicly as a person of interest before his arrest. If Egon had thought anything of it, he could maybe have pictured a situation where someone had seen Helge with Mads, and been afraid to come out and say anything. Bernd Doppler had been in charge of the power plant, Winden’s largest employer, until recently, and still held influence in the town; maybe someone had been scared to speak out against a member of his family. That had to be the reason; it made so much more sense than that something would happen in 2019 causing a future Ulrich Nielsen to suspect Helge, to travel back in time and tip off the 1986 team. But at the same time, this was a missing child they were talking about; would anyone who genuinely had knowledge of Helge Doppler’s guilt really have kept it to themselves?

This is ridiculous, he thought as he walked down the corridors of the psychiatric ward. Why was he even considering taking seriously that which he had dismissed as the ramblings of a madman when Helge Doppler was first arrested and had come out with his claim to have sent Mads to the future? But even as he thought that, he thought of the day when Mikkel had turned up at the police station and had asked what year it was; this question that had seemed so out of context at the time now could make more sense to Egon.

Egon took a seat across from Helge Doppler, who barely looked up in response.

“Helge,” Egon began, “when we first brought you in here, you were trying to tell me something about time travel.”

“You did not listen,” Helge muttered. “You thought it was crazy.”

“I’m listening now,” Egon replied. “Because I’m not so sure that it is.”

Chapter Text

“Okay, so when we spoke before about the disappearance of Mads Nielsen,” Egon began, “you told me that Mads had been sent to the future.”

“And you didn’t believe me,” Helge replied. “Your chief said it was crazy.”

“He’s not here, and I’m listening now. Would you like to tell me how you did that?” It did still sound nonsense to Egon’s ears, but this amount of references to time travel had been too much to be a coincidence, and if anyone had told him a few weeks earlier that he’d end up arresting someone from the future, or who claimed to be, he wouldn’t have believed that either.

“It is a chair,” Helge explained. “In the bunker. He wanted to travel in time. He sent Mads to the future. But I don’t think it worked. He has to be stopped.”

“He?” Egon repeated. “Who are you talking about? Who has to be stopped?”

“Noah.”

2019:

“What have you done?” Noah demanded.

“I? I had no more responsibility for this than you,” Claudia attempted to explain. “I do not understand myself how Ulrich Nielsen went through the door to 1986 instead of to 1953 as he was always supposed to do. If he has erased Charlotte and Elisabeth from existence, that is not because of anything I have done.”

“Do you honestly expect me to believe a word that you say?” Noah looked at Claudia with disgust.

“You still believe that I kidnapped Charlotte?” Claudia shook her head. “You are mistaken. I had nothing to do with that, or with this. I did not want this timeline to come to pass any more than you do; we are on the same side in this matter. The original timeline that you and I both remember must be restored so that Regina can live. Charlotte and Elisabeth will be returned. I am working to bring this about.”

“And so far, you appear to be failing,” Noah pointed out. “I think I may need to handle this myself.”

“It will happen,” Claudia tried to explain. “The fact that you are still here, that the Nielsens are still here, is proof of that. The original timeline will be restored. Let me handle it.”

“You mean the way you have handled things so far?” Noah snorted. “I think that you have done more than enough.”

1986:

There was no sign of the priest at St Christopher’s Church; Egon knew that a new priest had recently started working there, which fitted with Helge’s tale, although the new priest’s name was not Noah. Hanno Tauber was his name, according to the newspaper article about his arrival in Winden; it felt familiar to Egon in some way, although he couldn’t put his finger on why, at least not at first. He asked around at the church; no one had seen the priest for a couple of days, although no one had seemed to attach any importance to that at the time.

Next stop was the bunker Helge Doppler had mentioned; if any such device as the chair that supposedly sent Mads Nielsen into the future existed, that would lend some credence to Helge’s story. Egon didn’t quite know what he expected to find; there was still a part of him that could quite easily see himself disbelieving this whole thing altogether, and if he walked into the bunker to find a building that had been long since abandoned, he would not have been surprised. Instead, he walked in to find the building had been decorated with some particularly unattractive wallpaper, the chair that Helge had described to him sat there as a centrepiece. Egon peered at it, briefly considered sitting in it before deciding that was a very bad idea; not knowing how it worked, (or even if it would; based on what he had got out of Helge Doppler, it sounded unlikely) he thought he had better not try the device out for himself.

Two dates from November 1953 had been written on the wall; Egon tried to think back to that time period, to see if he could remember what they might have meant, but found that they meant nothing to him. (Well, it had been around that time that Agnes and Tronte had arrived, but that wouldn’t have been connected.) Yet he felt as though there were memories somewhere in his mind, not quite forming anything cohesive; something about their old dog Gretchen, a flash of Bernd Doppler getting angry about something to do with the power plant, although that made no sense because Egon couldn’t remember anything having gone wrong with the power plant at that time.

Maybe if he looked back at the old newspaper archives from that week in 1953, that would help him make sense of things; at least he would know why the dates seemed familiar to him. Egon headed to the archives, selected the relevant week in 1953 and leafed through some of the pages. Here was something promoting the opening of the new power plant (Egon did remember that, yet even as he read it, it felt wrong to him in a way; the sense that there had been some problem at the time was so strong to him in a way he couldn’t explain).

Wait a second. What was that? According to this article, a new priest had started working in Winden around that time…but this made no sense. 1953’s priest was also called Father Hanno Tauber, and the photograph in the article was the same man as in the article Egon had read from a few days earlier, looking exactly the same age.

Martha wished she’d just listened to Bartosz when he tried to talk her out of going, or had just believed Mikkel in the first place without trying to find out for herself; maybe then she wouldn’t have been stuck here.

Or maybe it would have still been okay if she hadn’t got involved with whatever was going on with her parents and Bartosz’s; maybe then she would have been able to get back to the caves, back through the tunnels to 2019, rather than being stuck here where everyone thought she was crazy. Having had time to think, Martha wondered whether there would actually have been any way of preventing what had happened (she’d known for ages that Aleksander Tiedemann had been shot once by someone unknown to him; Bartosz had explained that much after the time she’d seen his scar once when she was round at their place). But then if what Mikkel had said had been true, none of this timeline should ever have happened in the first place.

This was ridiculous. If Martha even tried to explain any of this to anyone, it would just leave them more convinced that she belonged in there. If she thought too much about it, about how she kept seeing Jonas Kahnwald even though he’d never existed, she’d probably end up agreeing with them.

Ironically, for all that she’d heard over the years about what a drunk incompetent fool Egon Tiedemann was, he seemed to be the person so far who’d been most sympathetic to her and prepared to hear her out. Here he was now, making his way towards her.

“I’ve talked to Helge Doppler,” he began, “and I think I believe you. But I’m going to need some kind of proof before I can convince Chief Dohring. Just give me time to check out these caves for myself, and then once I have something that will prove it to him, I’ll get you out of here.”

Martha watched him go, part of her getting up her hopes that he would do exactly as he said and help her get home, yet another part of her not quite daring to believe that anything would come of it, because she remembered now something else that her father had always told her about Egon Tiedemann in 1986.

It would be 33 years before she saw him again.

Chapter Text

Had 33 years really gone by, had it now come back around to the day when Martha had travelled back to 1986? She had lost track; one day was very much like another since she had been here. Since Egon had gone, she had given up trying to plead her case; no one else was ever going to believe her. And the visions of Jonas Kahnwald, the person who should not exist, continued to haunt her; sometimes he would tell her to hang on in there and that rescue would come, sometimes it would be more memories of something that Martha knew could never have happened. It almost had Martha believing she belonged on the ward after all.

Yet Claudia Tiedemann had said it was the day when she had broken her out of the ward, and her father, Magnus and Mikkel were there before her, looking just the same as the last time she had seen them. Martha struggled against Claudia’s vicelike grip, desperate to reach out to Mikkel, or to Magnus, to her mother slumped against her steering wheel, even to her father. Yet Claudia held firmly onto her, Magnus flinched from the sight of her, Mikkel looked upset and confused.

Even though Egon had promised he would come back for her, Martha had lost faith very quickly that this would happen; she had grown up hearing the story of how Egon had disappeared very shortly after Helge Doppler’s arrest. Ulrich had always had a lot to say on the subject, especially when he was drunk; he could go on for hours about how Egon still couldn’t locate his own ass, let alone Mads, even after Helge’s confession, and he’d taken off because he was so fucking incompetent. Now Martha was wondering whether something had happened to Egon in 2019, and that was why he had never returned.

“I am sorry that I have had to leave you here for as long as I did,” Claudia began.

“Then why did you?” Martha asked.

“Because the shock of seeing you was the only way of convincing your father that he has to set things right,” Claudia explained. “You can go back to 2019 without ever having spent the last 33 years in that place, and Jonas Kahnwald will exist again. But Ulrich has to make the right decision. He has to let Mikkel go back to 1986.”

Egon stepped into the caves, thinking of the directions Martha and Helge had given him. Both seemed to agree on how to get there, without having had the opportunity to confer, a point in favour of the story being true. If he made it successfully to 2019, there should be an abandoned armchair outside the entrance which Jurgen Obendorf and his family had used to store their stash; (from what Egon knew of Jurgen Obendorf, that didn’t entirely surprise him that that would be his future). Were these caves the way that Father Hanno Tauber had managed to be Winden’s parish priest in 1953 and 1986 simultaneously? If the machine as described by Helge really wasn’t working as had been intended, it would seem to be the only way.

He thought of Jana and Tronte Nielsen, venting their frustration at what they had perceived as his lack of action in Mads’s case, about the fact that his body had not yet been found even after they had a confession from Helge Doppler (even if, to them, it had seemed like nonsense). While Egon’s original intention had just been to prove to Martin Dohring that it was possible to travel in time through the caves, allowing Martha Nielsen to return to 2019 (or indeed to prove to himself that it was not, should that turn out to be the case, in which case he would concede to Dohring that Martha, and indeed Helge Doppler, were where they needed to be), he now realised that he needed to do more than this while he was in 2019. If he could allow Jana and Tronte that closure of knowing what really had happened to Mads, Egon wanted to do that for them; if Helge and Noah really had managed to send Mads to 2019, Egon wanted to bring him home.

This was the door Martha had mentioned, with the Latin inscription Sic Mundus Creatus Est (whatever that meant). Egon made his way through the door that Martha and Helge had indicated, noticing the other door as he went. Martha had made no mention of that one; Helge Doppler had said that taking that route would lead Egon into the past instead, to 1953. Momentarily Egon wondered what would have happened if he had taken that route instead, encountered the younger version of himself, then stopped himself; this was not the time to think of might have beens.

Egon realised he was approaching the exit to the caves; he glanced around, trying to acclimatise himself to his surroundings. There, just as Martha had mentioned, was the beat up looking old armchair that Martha had described.

So it was true. Egon had successfully travelled to 2019.

“Okay, Magnus,” Torben began, trying to take control of this chaos that was unravelling before him, “best thing you can do is take Mikkel home, like I said, call your grandparents.” He already had Ulrich cuffed to his steering wheel as a temporary measure until backup could get there; he had expected a little more resistance from him, but Ulrich had been so shocked at the sight of the woman before him claiming to be his daughter that he’d barely reacted as Torben cuffed him. He turned to see what was happening with the two Mrs Nielsens, to see that Officer Justyna Jankowski was trying to handle it. Katharina Nielsen had regained consciousness, but seemed groggy.

“It’s okay, Katharina, I called the ambulance, it’s on its way. The hospital will check you over, they may want to keep you overnight to make sure you don’t have concussion, but they’ll make that decision when they see you.” Hannah, meanwhile, had got out of her car and made her way over to Katharina’s, trying to push her way past Officer Jankowski and demanding that Katharina tell her why she was following Ulrich.

“Hannah, I must insist that you step back, give Katharina some space. When the ambulance gets here, I think they’re going to want to check you over as well.”

Hannah wasn’t even listening; she had just caught a glimpse of Ulrich, handcuffed to his steering wheel. “Ulrich!” she yelled as she tried to break free from Officer Jankowski to run towards him.

“As soon as you’ve been checked over by the paramedics, you can see him,” Officer Jankowski promised; Torben raised an eyebrow at that, but Officer Jankowski explained in a whisper “It was the quickest way to get her to cooperate. I don’t know how long they’ll want to keep her in; probably not as long as Katharina Nielsen, since she seems in better shape. But we’ll handle it when it becomes an issue.”

“What’s the ETA on the paramedics?” Torben asked.

“About ten minutes, last I heard. Oh, they gave me an update on Bartosz Tiedemann. They’re still checking him over, making sure he doesn’t also have concussion, but it sounds like he’s going to be fine apart from a bump on the head for the next couple of days. Aleksander is on his way to the hospital to meet him.”

“Okay, that’s great. You stick with them for now, keep an eye on Katharina just while we’re waiting for the ambulance and…” Before Torben could finish his sentence, Hannah made a run towards Ulrich again.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Jankowski muttered as she snapped the handcuffs on Hannah. “You can see him later. Right now I need you to wait with me until you’ve been checked over.”

Satisfied that Hannah had been dealt with, Torben turned back towards the Nielsens. Magnus appeared to be finishing up his call to Jana; Mikkel appeared to be trying to make his way towards the patient from the ward as Magnus, having hung up, tried to stop him. Torben had known the story for years; everyone in Winden knew the story of how Aleksander Tiedemann had been shot in a struggle with an unknown girl in his youth. The story of how said unknown girl had claimed to be from the future was less common knowledge; Torben had only known that himself when he’d looked up the files after being notified of her escape. But even with this knowledge, Torben still found it hard to equate the unknown woman with Martha Nielsen; it was only a few days earlier that Ulrich had come into work talking about how Martha had wanted to stay out late with Bartosz and thought he would be more sympathetic to her cause than Katharina.

This one was going to require more backup; Jankowski already had her hands full with the two Mrs Nielsens, and in any other circumstances, the person he would have called on to help with this would, of course, have been Ulrich. He quickly made a call to the station asking for assistance bringing in Claudia Tiedemann, the escaped prisoner, and Ulrich, before seeing that Tronte’s car had arrived. “Just get Magnus and Mikkel home for now; I’ll call you later regarding Ulrich,” he hastily explained; Tronte looked bewildered, but nodded as he approached his grandsons. As Torben waited for his backup, he wondered if today could possibly get any worse.

Noah took a long look at the gun he held in his hand before putting it into his back pocket. It was abundantly clear to him that despite everything she had said, Claudia was making no progress with restoring the timeline to how it should have been, with bringing Elisabeth and Charlotte back into existence. He could not leave this in her hands any longer; it was time for him to take matters into his own hands.

As far as he could see, this had all started when Ulrich Nielsen had somehow managed to stray from his path, from what was planned for him, and had managed to make his way into 1986. It was his role in Helge Doppler’s arrest that had led to Elisabeth and Charlotte having become erased from the timeline; Noah would fix things, but before he did, Ulrich and Claudia had to be dealt with.

Chapter Text

“So, what you’re trying to tell me is, it’s possible to time travel to 1986 through the caves, that you went back there to rescue Mikkel, and our mystery patient is your daughter who got stuck there after having gone back in time herself. Plus you were responsible for the anonymous tip off about Helge Doppler, as a result of which someone called Charlotte is no longer our chief.”

Listening to Torben repeat his story in that mocking tone of voice, Ulrich wondered all over again just how, exactly, this man had become chief in this timeline, even with Charlotte out of the picture for reasons he still didn’t understand. Yes, Ulrich could understand why the story seemed unbelievable to him, but if he just stopped wasting everyone’s time with this, Ulrich could get back to 1986, rescue Martha before it ever got to this stage.

Wait a minute. He should have thought of this sooner, it had been staring him in the face all along; there was a way he could prove to Torben after all that his story was true.

“I need someone to take a sample of my DNA,” he began.

Torben stared at him. “Your DNA?”

“And then I need someone to compare it with the DNA of the dead boy who was found in the forest. That boy is my brother Mads.”

“Your brother,” Torben repeated, humouring him. “Your brother who disappeared in…1986? That’s not possible. This dead boy is about the same age that Mikkel is now, and can only have been dead a few days. If Mads had died only a few days ago, he would be in his forties now.”

“You’re right, it does seem impossible,” Ulrich replied. “But not if he travelled through time. Take the sample of my DNA and compare it with his. Or even get my parents in, get them to provide a sample too. If the samples come back saying we are not related, then that will be the end of it. But I think it will come back saying that we’re siblings. Look at that scar on his chin. I gave that to him. Mads got that scar on Christmas Day 1985 when we had a fight over some action figure and he cut his chin on the glass coffee table. We spent half that Christmas Day in the hospital while Ines Kahnwald treated him. My parents will remember. Check the scar against any photograph of Mads that was taken in 1986. You will see it’s the same. You’ll see that I’m telling the truth.”

Egon stared at the headline on the front page of the 2019 Winden Tagesblatter, with the story of the unidentified deceased boy and how Chief Torben Woller was appealing for any possible leads as to his identity. (Ulrich Nielsen was also mentioned as being involved with the investigation; he had been proven wrong in his comment to Mikkel that Ulrich would never work for Winden police). Based on the description in the article, it looked to him like he had finally found the whereabouts of Mads Nielsen; Jana and Tronte could finally get their closure. As for Helge Doppler, it was now clear to Egon that he was not insane as Dohring had believed him to be; however, whatever the role played by Noah, Helge could not deny his own part. Maybe he would be moved to a regular prison rather than the ward; that would be a conversation Egon would have with Dohring once he had set Martha Nielsen free.

He went to pay for his newspaper, imagining the look on Dohring’s face when he presented him with it and Dohring had to admit that time travel was possible after all.

“Deutsche Marks? Pfennigs?” the cashier stared at the money Egon had just handed him. “Sir, these haven’t been legal tender in almost 20 years. Do you have any Euros?”

“Euros?” Egon repeated. What was this Euro? He had known, of course, that things would have changed in the intervening years, but had never thought of the possibility that this would include a new currency. Martha had told him nothing beyond her own family’s history, had refused to engage with Dohring’s stupid jokes about who was going to win the next World Cup; Egon had had no idea of what he was walking into.

“I’m sorry, we can’t accept out of date currency,” the cashier continued. “Wait a second…1986?” He gestured towards the article in the newspaper. “Wasn’t that the date on the pfennig that was found with that kid?”

“Pfennig?” There was that flash again, something sounding familiar about the power plant in 1953, that mention of the pfennig dated 1986; had there been something to do with such a pfennig when whatever problem had happened with the power plant? He wanted to say there had, but Egon was still unable to pull this memory to the surface, could not reconcile it with what he had read in the 1953 newspapers where the opening of the power plant had gone without a hitch.

“It says it right there in the article. He was found with a 1986 pfennig on him.”

Egon backed away. “I think I had better go,” he muttered, before turning to leave the store. This had been a mistake. The best thing he could do now was get to the police station, hopefully to meet with Ulrich Nielsen, but failing that, he needed to talk to someone, maybe this Torben Woller, make certain that the boy was indeed Mads Nielsen.

“Magnus is trying to distract Mikkel with a video game,” Tronte said as he walked back into the room to see Jana hanging up the phone. “Was that the hospital? Katharina? Hannah? Has something happened?”

“That was Chief Woller,” Jana slowly turned around to face him; Tronte could tell that whatever Torben had said had come as a shock to her. “He was calling about our son.”

“Ulrich? Are they still questioning him?” Tronte was waiting for Jana to say something like they were charging him with attempting to abduct Mikkel, or that they were admitting him to that ward where Helge Doppler had spent the last thirty three years; he still wasn’t sure he quite understood what had been going on, but he doubted Ulrich would be coming home any time soon. Magnus and Mikkel would most likely be staying with them until Katharina was well enough to leave hospital.

“Not Ulrich.” Jana shook her head. “He said there was a possibility that they have found Mads. But he wasn’t making sense. He was talking about that dead boy they found, that they want to take a DNA sample from us. Apparently Ulrich was insisting that that boy is Mads. But he can’t be. Torben must want me to go down there and see if I can reason with Ulrich, explain to him that it’s not possible.”

Tronte shook his head. “He’s telling the truth. That boy is our son.”

November 4th, 2019.

“You!”

What was this madness? Claudia Tiedemann, his old love who had been missing since 1987 and long since declared dead by Regina, summoning him to the old Doppler bunker asking him to tell no one, and Tronte finding her there with the body of his missing son, looking as if he hadn’t aged a day since 1986?

“What have you done?”

“I have done nothing,” Claudia began. “This is not my handiwork. Helge was telling the truth when my father arrested him in 1986; he did send your son through time. But this is not how it was supposed to happen.”

“You knew this all along?” Tronte rounded on her. “You joined in with the search parties, you were the person I turned to for support at the time, and you knew the whole time that Helge Doppler had killed my son?”

“Not then,” Claudia explained. “I will explain in due course. But first I need your help. Mads needs to be found, but it must not be here. Nothing that has happened in this timeline was ever meant to come to pass; I need you to help me to move Mads to where he needs to be found, to set the timeline on its correct course again.”

“Nothing was meant to come to pass…are you telling me that if I help you now, that will stop Mads from going missing?” This made no sense to Tronte; however, neither had anything else that he had witnessed that night, so he was not sure why that should be any different.

“No child will go missing in Winden,” Claudia confirmed.

“I know it sounds mad,” Tronte tried to explain, “and I never expected you to believe any of it if I had tried to explain to you. And you would have been right not to believe. Claudia talked of setting right the timeline so that no one went missing, but Mads is still dead; I should never have listened to her, I should have come to you straight away.”
“Claudia, Claudia, Claudia. Always it has been Claudia. You were with her the night that Mads went missing, you were with her when he was found. You have known this for over a week, and you let me continue to live with not knowing what had happened to my son.”

“Our son,” Tronte corrected.

“I will go to the police station to meet with Chief Woller,” Jana continued as though he had not spoken, “and to see my son. I would prefer it if you remained behind.”

“I know you only took those tests to humour Ulrich,” Officer Jankowski began, “and we wouldn’t expect the results today anyway even though I asked for them to be done as quickly as possible. But I got out the old file from 1986, looked at the old photographs that Jana Nielsen gave Egon Tiedemann at the time.”

“And what were your conclusions from that?” Torben asked.

“The disfigurement to the eyes doesn’t help,” Jankowski admitted, “but I did see a scar on his chin just like the one Ulrich described, and like the one from the photograph taken of both brothers for Mother’s Day in 1986. Obviously we need to wait for the official results to come in, and Jana’s on her way to see if she can identify the body, but I’m starting to believe that Ulrich is telling the truth.”

Chapter Text

“Okay, take your time,” Torben said to Jana, “I’m going to show you him now.” He drew back the sheet covering the body of the as yet unidentified boy.

Jana glanced down at the boy; although it had been thirty three years, she could still remember exactly what he had been wearing as he had left to meet Regina before their fencing lesson, and as Ulrich had previously stated, there was the scar to his chin from Christmas Day 1985. Even with the damage to his eyes, Jana would still have known her son anywhere.

“Yes,” she said. “This is my son.”

She looked at Torben, knew he was struggling with what to say; “sorry for your loss” might have been his usual response, but Jana had technically lost her son thirty three years earlier. Plus he was probably still processing the fact that time travel had been proved to be real; Jana could understand that, since she was having the same trouble herself.

“Do you need me to call anyone for you?” Torben asked. “Your husband, perhaps?”

No, Tronte was not who Jana needed to be around right now; she had forgiven him for the long ago affair with Claudia, which had been easier for her to do with Claudia not being around, but could not forgive him for having kept Mads’s fate from her as long as he had. “I need my son,” she said instead. “I need Ulrich. We have all seen for ourselves that he is not insane; you have no reason to hold him. Bring my son Ulrich to me.”

It was ridiculous, Ulrich thought, that he was still handcuffed as Torben led him towards his mother; Torben had explained that while he was satisfied now that Ulrich had been telling the truth about rescuing Mikkel from 1986, there was still the matter of his attempt to flee Winden with Mikkel without Katharina’s knowledge that they needed to discuss.

“That’s a personal matter between myself and Katharina,” Ulrich argued, “and one that we can resolve once she is out of hospital if you just let me go, let me rescue Martha from 1986. If you still think I’ll run, you can come with me to 1986 yourself to make sure.”

“You do not have to set foot in 1986 again,” came a new voice. “You should stay here with your son. Mikkel needs you now. I will arrange Martha’s freedom myself.”

“Who are you?” Torben demanded. But Ulrich knew this face very well, and from Jana’s shriek of horror when she recognised him, he knew his mother remembered him too. As far as Ulrich remembered, Egon Tiedemann had been found dead in 1987; how, then, was he standing before them today?

“Tiedemann?”

“But I do not understand,” Jana began. “You disappeared, not that long after Mads, after Helge was arrested, no one has seen you since 1986.”

“Wait, what?” Ulrich exclaimed. “That’s not what happened in my time.” In the timeline Ulrich had come from, in the days between Mads’s disappearance and Tiedemann being found dead by Regina, Ulrich had imagined over and over again many possible ways of Tiedemann being removed from post due to his sheer incompetence. Torben Woller had interrupted his reading of the 1986 newspapers before he could read any more developments of the case following Helge’s arrest, and events had moved too swiftly for him to have given any thought to what fate may have befallen his old nemesis in this new timeline. But when Jana said that Tiedemann had disappeared back then, Ulrich found himself wondering how this timeline’s teenage version of himself would have reacted. Would he have dismissed it as Tiedemann taking off because he’d made such a screwup of the case?

“What do you mean?” Egon turned towards Ulrich. “What happens to me in your time?” He then turned towards Jana. “Or you? What do you mean I disappear?”

“That’s not what’s important right now,” Ulrich made a split second decision. “Do it. Get Martha released from custody in 1986, let her come home.” He’d never imagined a situation where he would be putting his faith in Egon Tiedemann, working together, but in this case, needs must. Then he thought of what his mother had said about Tiedemann disappearing, knew he couldn’t take any chances with getting Martha home. “But we do it together. I want to be sure that Martha makes it back.”

“But what about Mikkel?” Jana asked. “And Magnus?”

“They’ll be safe with Papa for as long as it takes,” Ulrich replied. “I shouldn’t even need to be gone overnight. Then I’ll have all the time in the world to spend with my family.”

If all went well, he would have the Martha they all knew and loved back home with them by nightfall; once all his children were safe, Ulrich would then talk to Katharina, try and make things right with her, formally extricate himself from the relationship with Hannah. And he’d kept his promise to Jurgen Obendorf; Erik was home. That other kid, Yasin, would also be safe.

But he still didn’t understand the changes that had occurred in this timeline, changes that would presumably be permanent with both Martha and Mikkel home. Being raised somewhere that wasn’t Winden, by someone who wasn’t Helge, could only be better for Peter Doppler; Ulrich could live with that particular change. What he still couldn’t understand was why Charlotte Doppler didn’t seem to be present in this timeline, and he knew that by keeping Peter from Winden, he was also preventing the existence of Franziska and Elisabeth Doppler. He also could live with Michael Kahnwald not being part of the timeline, considering he was never meant to have been there in 1986 at all, but to live out his planned life as Mikkel Nielsen in the 21st century. And as for Jonas Kahnwald, while Jonas had always been good friends with Magnus and Martha, and had been the most patient of all their friends with Mikkel, Ulrich could not honestly say he was upset at the idea of the person who had lured Mikkel to 1986 in the first place not being there in this new world. But was it up to him to make the decision that Magnus’s girlfriend Franziska, or her sister Elisabeth, should not exist? And what of Charlotte, a friend as well as his chief (and a chief who did a better job than Torben Woller, at that)? It had to be some kind of result of his actions that had led Charlotte not to be present in this timeline, even if he didn’t know what that was; should he be doing more to find out what that was and somehow bring her back?

And yet there was also the Helge angle; Ulrich’s actions in tipping off Winden Police Department about Helge’s involvement in Mads’s case may have been the reason why Franziska and Elisabeth no longer existed, but what would have been the alternative? No one ever facing justice for Mads, and that man roaming Winden freely, free to kidnap someone else (Erik Obendorf, Yasin Friese, or even someone else who had not been kidnapped in Ulrich’s original timeline)? Was this something Ulrich could ever live with?

It wasn’t as if Ulrich could do anything to bring back anyone who didn’t appear to be present in this timeline, since he didn’t understand himself how some of them had come not to exist. And the one thing he knew he couldn’t do was anything involving Helge Doppler walking free. It may have been too late for Mads now, but one thing that Ulrich could do for his brother’s memory was ensure that the person responsible for his death faced justice.

He had to prioritise Martha and Mikkel; he had a chance of fixing his own family. And apart from Claudia, who was obviously nuts, no one else even knew that the Dopplers or Jonas Kahnwald were missing from the timeline. His decision was made; he would concentrate on rebuilding his own family, accept the timeline as it was, as he felt it always should have been. Why would anyone else even think of saving people who, as far as they were concerned, had never actually existed?

“You! Nielsen!”

Ulrich whirled around to see Claudia Tiedemann being manhandled in by some man – a priest – holding a gun to her neck.

“Who the hell are you?” Ulrich demanded, but as soon as he’d said that he realised the man did look familiar; wasn’t this the priest who’d done that last Midnight Mass in 1986? Father…Tauber, that was it. He could remember his mother trying to talk to him at the time and Tauber just trying to get away, and hadn’t there been something after that where he’d left very abruptly?

“My Charlotte, my Elisabeth. Both gone from the timeline, because of you. You need to fix everything you have changed, to bring them back.”

What the hell had Charlotte and Elisabeth Doppler got to do with this asshole? Ulrich had no clue, but as far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to do as Father Tauber had demanded. “Mikkel stays where he belongs, with me,” he growled back.

“Then you leave me with no choice.” As Egon Tiedemann leapt in front of Ulrich, Noah’s fingers edged towards the trigger…